Lens-less flat camera

[terrafamilia]

Bulky Cameras, Meet The Lens-less FlatCam

Camera technology has improved dramatically in the past decades, but one thing about even the newest cameras has stayed constant: They all have lenses.

Now, that's changing.

Engineers in Texas are building a camera that can make a sharp image with no lens at all.

A stepping stone to OPA sensors? Here's the paper -
FlatCam: Thin, Bare-Sensor Cameras using Coded Aperture and Computation

Ciao,

Terrafamilia

[Rynn]

Cool. I like the idea of a wall paper that is covered in thousands of these sensors. Seems like a good basis for invisible unisurv.

[stevebowers]

This would be useful for chameleon tech. A flatcam layer receives the light incident on one side of an object, and a phased-array system transmits the same image on the opposite side of the object, thus making the object appear transparent in all directions (not just one).

[JohnnyYesterday]

You'd need phased arrays to act as the cameras and display to achieve true invisibility; the scene would have to be recorded holographically. Otherwise, what you'd have would be a flat moving image wrapped around a 3D object--which would look like Predator camo.

[stevebowers]

That would be better than nothing, but you are right. Invisibility is a difficult trick, and I don't expect to see it in my lifetime